


In The End (it doesn’t even matter)

by Misanagi



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Endgame Spoilers, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon What Canon, Fanfiction Therapy, Fix-It, Gen, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Canon Fix-It, Rec me fics please, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark-centric, You Have Been Warned, i need them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-04 12:36:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18604657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misanagi/pseuds/Misanagi
Summary: I just came back from watching Endgame and I really can’t go back to real life without fanfiction. Set immediately after the movie.**SPOILERS. LOTS OF THEM. STAY AWAY IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THE MOVIE.**





	In The End (it doesn’t even matter)

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers. 
> 
> SPOILERS.
> 
> This is nothing but Spoilers. 
> 
> Spoilers galore.
> 
> All your spoilers are belong to us. 
> 
> YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!
> 
>  
> 
> *Dusts off the keyboard* 
> 
> Yeah, I just came back from watching Endgame and I really can’t go back to real life without fanfiction, so yeah, first new writing in _almost five years_.
> 
> Not sure of how it turned out but it’s something, it’s catharsis and it’s out of my head. 
> 
> I’m rusty so please forgive me and all the spelling/grammar mistakes that ~~might~~ will definitely slip through. 
> 
> Unbetaed.

“So, can I have that drink now?”

“No… just no. I didn’t just sacrificed myself to save to whole fucking world, the universe, mind you, to end up in hell with you!”

“Always so dramatic…”

Tony turned away from the grinning god of lies to look at Natasha. Natasha Romanoff, weird two colored hair and all. “This really isn’t the afterlife I was hoping for,” he said with a sigh. 

First of all it was bright. It was bright withe as if the nothingness they appeared to be standing on was illuminated by led lights. There was also a green lady sharpening a sword and apparently ignoring everything else around her. 

“You,” said Tony pointing at Natasha, “explain.”

“As if a mortal could even begin to understand the magnitud and intricacies of the soul dimension,” Loki scoffed. 

“Oh, fuck it” Tony let himself slump to the floor. He was done. He had been done. He took his last breath, he died, looking at Pepper’s eyes, knowing (and not because she had said it) that things were going to be alright. Thanos was gone. His army was gone and Tony. Was. Done.

Done. 

Years living with dread, knowing it was going to end in blood. Battle after battle, one sacrifice after another and this was it. This was the endgame. The kid was back, the battle was won and he was done!

He’d left a better world. He made peace with betrayal, with grief and with his own death. He had know, somehow that he probably wasn’t coming back. But it was okay. Strange had given him the signal. It was the one chance, one in 14 fucking million! It was the right move. He had done, he had snapped his fingers and then it was done. 

**Done.**

“Come on, Tony, look at me!”

He didn’t realize he had closed his eyes until he opened them to look at Natasha. She was crouching in front of him, her face only inches away from him and looking worried. She gave him a soft smile. “Better?”

No. Not at all. 

“What is this?” He asked, his words carried years of exhaustion. 

“Heaven, purgatory, the soul dimension, I don’t know.” Natasha’s voice was soft. “I haven’t been here that long.”

“Well I have,” Loki sounded exasperated. “Years. And as I’ve told you before, repeatedly, you dim witted sheep, this is the soul dimension.”

“Yeah, no,” said Tony, suddenly annoyed. “What I need to know is how to get out of here so I don’t have to spend eternity with you.”

Eternity. 

He felt lightheaded. “Can you feel lightheaded in heaven?” Which of course this wasn’t because heaven wasn’t real, even though Asgardians and Infinity Stones and time travel was. “Or the quantum plane? This definitely doesn’t look like the quantum plane.” Unless he had traveled somehow farther. That was uncharted territory, but how? He had died, he hadn’t been caught in an explosion of pushed into the time machine, he had simply sat down and stopped. 

“Tony, come one, breathe. You’re panicking.” Natasha’s voice sounded far away. 

Can you have a panic attack in hell? Can you breathe? Was there air wherever he was? If in space no one can hear you scream then in hell you can panic to your heart’s content. He put a hand on his chest, checking for a beat and felt the familiar cool metal of the Arc Reactor. 

…Which apparently had decided to go Rainbow Brite and start glowing in colors. 

“Who messed with my Arc Reactor?” He tapped the glass but the blue, orange, red, purple, green and amber lights remained the same. “I don’t like people touching my tech”.

“Sir, please take slow and steady breaths.”

Tony’s head snapped up looking for Vision— but no, he never called him Sir. Not ever, not once. “JA…” His mouth was dry and, dead of not, his heart was pounding in his chest. “JARVIS?”

“It’s good to see you again, Sir.”

There was a long momento of silence and then Tony said, “That’s it… I’m crazy.” 

Because JARVIS couldn’t see. There was nothing, nothing in this emptiness, so there were no cameras for JARVIS to see, and no servers for him to live in, and no speakers for him to speak. 

And what must have happened was that he had just lost if after Afghanistan and had been locked up in a loony bin ever since, dreaming of space battles and fucking talking raccoons. And now some new treatment or medicine was kind of snapping him out of it, and all the bright white he was seeing was just his nice padded cell in the probably ridiculously expensive mental hospital he had been living in for the past 11 years. 

“JARVIS?” Natasha asked, managing not to sound surprised at all. 

“How did you bring your magical servant here with you, Stark?” Loki was looking at him closely and then looked up. “Voice, how did you appear here?”

“His name is JARVIS,” Tony corrected mechanically. “And he’s no servant.”

“You flatter me, Sir.”

Tony shook his head. “No. I’m just talking to myself while suffering from massive hallucinations.”

“You’re all idiots.” The green woman was apparently done with her sword. She was dressed in tight leather outfit with a gun in a hip hostler and Tony was almost sure that no matter how cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs he was, he would never hallucinate something quite like her. 

“Okay,” said Tony making a massive effort not to look down at his chest and it’s eerily familiar glowing colors. “Maybe you can explain then, miss… sorry, I didn’t catch your name with the whole waking up in the soul dimension thing.”

“Gamora.”

“Oh.” _‘Why is Gamora suddenly’_ didn’t seem like such a ridiculous question after all. “You’re dead. Actually,” he added, looking around, “we’re all dead.” 

“We are,” Gamora agreed. “And we aren’t.”

“We’re trapped,” Loki added. Like the diva he was, he couldn’t let anyone else do the explaining. “We’ve been barred from the realm of the dead, preserved in the soul dimension. Saved as its prizes.”

Now that he was looking and not freaking out (as much) Tony noticed that Loki’s outfit seemed too familiar. “When exactly did you die?” He asked the god as he stood up to walk closer to him. “Does the name Hela mean anything to you?”

“What is it to you, mortal?”

“Yeah, no. Something tells me this Loki isn’t exactly original recipe.” Tony looked him up and down. “If I hadn’t seen you again just today, I wouldn’t have recognized that outfit. Led any Chitauri armies to Earth lately?”

“You’re saying,” Natasha took a step closer to Loki. “that this isn’t the Loki Thanos killed?”

“There might have been a teeny, tiny, problem retrieving the Tesseract in 2012 and that timeline’s Loki might have stolen it and gotten away.”

“None of that matters,” said Gamora. “You don’t get it. Every second we stay here the word moves on. Without us. If we don’t get out in their timeline there’ll be no point.”

“Who’s timeline?” asked Natasha. 

“Mine, yours, my friends’, your family’s or whoever’s you left behind!” Gamora was gripping her sword tightly. “They’ll die! They’ll move on and we’ll be here.”

“And they won’t.”

Pepper won’t. Rhodey wont. They kid wont. And Morgan… 

“So that’s it?” Tony asked, not really talking to anyone. “I kill Thanos, save the Universe and not only don’t I get a happy ending, I get to live without my daugh— to be… To be left. Behind.”

“No!” Gamora said. “We get out.”

“That appears to be the best course of action.” JARVIS agreed in his calm voice. 

“JARVIS, buddy, mind explaining how you’re here?” Tony shook his head and concentrated on that instead of thinking of not ever seeing Morgan again, not even being able to watch over her. “Let’s asume I’m not crazy and we’re really trapped in some weird soul place, how're you here?”

“You created me, Sir. After Ultron I stopped. A small part of me was left behind and then it snapped back and I was here. Waiting.”

“His soul is here,” Gamora said. “Like ours. If you can’t see him is because he wasn’t corporeal. This is a place for souls. We project ourselves as we remember ourselves. As we died.”

“And Vision was never JARVIS,” Natasha added. 

“What’s the point of all this talk?” asked Loki sounding bored. “The servant has a soul, therefore it’s trapped here with us.”

“He’s not a servant!” Tony corrected. “And why us? How?” Tony looked back at his chest and touched the Arc Reactor softly. 

“I’m afraid I don’t have the answers, Sir.”

Tony groaned. “I hate magic.” Because wondering if JARVIS was connected to the internet, or if his knowledge was part of his soul, and what exactly defined a soul, was giving him a headache. “Natasha and Gamora were sacrifices. I snapped my fingers and I died. We are all connected to the soul stone. What about you, Reindeer games? Why do you think this is the soul plane?”

“Dimension.” Loki glared at him. “My mother told me, the Soul Stone holds a special place among the Infinity Stones. It’s mysterious and powerful as it deals with the essence of what makes us individuals. Its power can connect the souls that have passed to those that still live and it can keep some souls in itself, in the pocket dimension in which it exists.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you’re here,” Natasha said. “In Vormir I knew I was exchanging myself for the stone. And Tony,” she smiled at him in a way she hadn’t since before Ultron. “He made the sacrifice play. He died wielding it.”

“And Sir created me,” JARVIS repeated. “When all of me died, including the part that was in the stone, I came here. But that doesn’t explain Loki, since he was already here.”

The god sighed. “I saw you, you know?” he said to Tony. “The second you, the time traveler you. You weren’t as cleverly disguised as you wished.” He grinned. “You gave me just the opportunity I needed so I took the Tesseract and tapped into it’s energy to escape but it didn’t quite work out.”

“You died,” said Gamora, interested for the first time in what was being said. 

“No. I went into the Tesseract and came out in Vormir. The Soul Stone wanted a new guardian.”

“I would have remembered you being in Vormir,” Natasha pointed out. 

“I refused.” Loki grinned. “And then I was here. Alone since the ser—JARVIS”, he corrected himself at Tony’s glare, “didn’t learn to speak until recently.”

“There was no one I wished to converse with,” JARVIS deadpanned. 

“it’s been what, years then?” Tony looked at Gamora. “And what makes you think there’s a way out?”

“A soul for a soul,” quoted Natasha. “That’s what the guardian said.”

“Exactly,” said Gamora. “And since the Soul stone is no longer in possession of the one who scarified us, then we should be back.”

* *

Time didn’t really pass inside the soul dimension. There was no sleep, no hunger, no tiredness, pain of darkness. The light remained and there was nothing but talk and endless theories. 

Tony had gone quiet a while back. He had told them what had happened on earth in short and clipped sentences and then let them talk. If it wasn’t JARVIS, he would have thought that this was his personal hell, an eternity with Natasha, Loki and a green lady he just met with nothing to do but speculate. 

But in no version of hell he or any being could conjure up for Tony Stark, would he ever have JARVIS back. JARVIS was the steady voice that always brought him back whenever he felt on the verge of a panic attack. He was a link to home, his son, and his steady voice kept Tony from just screaming and screaming until… until what? If this was eternity then there would be no end. 

Gamora was right. They had to get out. 

He had spent however long it had been since Gamora’s little soul exchange theory staring at his chest. Earlier, he had tried to take out the Arc Reactor but it wouldn’t budge. It stayed firmly in the middle of his chest with the colors — the lights of the Infinity Stones, Tony, just admit it — glowing brightly.

Natasha and Gamora had been sacrifices. Loki had been pulled through the Tesseract. JARVIS had reunited after Thanos killed Vision. And Tony had held the power that had created the universe. 

“Well, I was never much of a theorist.” Tony stood up and called the armor to him. “Experimentation is more my style.”

“I congratulate you on the upgrade, Sir,” JARVIS said and his voice was coming from inside the suit, just like it had before. 

“Scan this place, J,” Tony said as he took flight, ignoring the yells from Gamora, Natasha and Loki. 

“Impossible to measure the dimensions. No life signs detected,”

Tony’s pounding heart disagreed. He saw the others become smaller and smaller as he rose up and up and up. 

“I don’t believe there’s an escape hatch at the top, Sir. Might I recommend a different approach?”

“I’m all ears, buddy,” Tony said, without slowing down. 

“Perhaps something less scientific and more introspective.”

Tony scoffed. “I raised you better than that.”

“We _are_ in the soul dimension. When in Rome…”

The others had become just little dots in the distance but Tony kept pushing upwards. “Yeah, I’m not the meditating type. I can’t see what the Soul Stone or dimension would want with me.”

“Unimaginable what it would want with a soul creator, wilder of the power of the Infinity Stones.”

Tony stoped, hovering on air, uncertain. “Soul, power, time, space, mind and reality.” He tapped each color in the Arc Reactor. “If the others finished the job, the stones are trapped back in time, waiting to be collected again and destroyed. They’re the Schrödinger's Stones, existing and not existing at the same time. Here,” Tony tapped the Arc Reactor. “And not here.”

He powered down the repulsors and let himself fall. 

“Sir, I’m not confident the impact won’t harm you.”

“We have to open the box, J.” 

Even if the cat is dead, it’s better to know.

* * *

“And what happens when you die?”

That’s the question that keeps him up at night. Because maybe he could go back to that blank nothingness or maybe he would go to where all the souls go, or maybe he’s already dead and this is actually heaven. Or maybe, or even worse, he won’t die at all.

“No tearful ceremony by the lake, Pep. Once was enough.”

She hides her tears with a small laugh. “We would have been okay, you know,” she says, looking at the glow of the Arc Reactor. “But this,” she squeezes his hand, tightly. “This is definitely better”.

Maybe it’s okay then, that he’s not quite done yet.

**Author's Note:**

> Not the end, because we were hoping but didn’t quite get a happy ending. So just let it not end, and keep it unfinished, keep it going, keep it undone.


End file.
